Monday, February 13, 2017

BDO wealth: the market system

Unless you want to spend hours actively grinding mobs for their silver, you will have to use the market to liquidate your products. Also, everything is available on the market, including high-end gear:

I got my full TET gear in August (now it's obviously outdated). I strongly recommend selling your drops and black stones and let others suffer with the upgrade system and just buy the gear you want. Only upgrade yourself if the item you want is totally unavailable.

I've returned only to write a comprehensive guide. I didn't even set my hotkeys and skills after they were reseted some time while I was away as I'm not planning to kill a single mob while climb back to the Wealth toplist.

The first and most important thing is that you must have a "subscription", by buying the monthly "Value pack". It has several effects, but the most important is the market tax reduction:

Without value pack, you get 65% of the money the buyer paid for your item, the rest is lost. With it, you get 84.5%. It's not optional. If you don't want to spend money on BDO, you lose significant part of your income.

The second thing is the fixed price system.

There is a minimum and maximum price hard-coded into the system (shown in the middle of the market screen, 205/281 on the example) and you must sell between these values. The problem is that for most items the equilibrium price is out of this range. When the price range is too low, the market is empty. This is most obvious with pay-to-win items that you buy with real money and sell for silver. The buyers would pay more for it, so even if you list for maximum price, it is instantly snatched:

When the price range is too high, there are many-many sellers trying to sell for minimum price, but there aren't enough buyers for that price:

While making money, you meet this issue more often. If the automatically suggested price is equal to the minimum price, you shall check the market listings of that item (yellow circle) and most likely find lots of items for minimum price. This case you should either transform your item into something that sells or vendor it. There is no point locking up one of your selling slots with a never-selling order. It's not the number of competing items that matters but its ratio against how many are sold per day. The EU servers are up for 300 days, so while there are lots of Cooking Honey on the market right now (23K), but I can still list it due to 65M sold, so 216K/day. All you should do is divide the big number with the small and if it's larger than 300, you'll sell in a day.

Selling time is crucial, because you only have 30 market orders and can't increase that even with pay-to-win. Ergo if every item takes one day to sell, you sell 30 items per day, which isn't much. You can increase the value of items by cooking or processing them first, but the main point is to either increase the speed of sales by cutting the price or when it's impossible, just sell the item to an NPC to prevent clogging the marketplace.

In Europe (and probably many other locales) the markets are linked, so if you list something in Velia, one can buy it in Altinova. You can also collect the gold at any marketplaces, but you can only cancel orders where they are listed.